Every Arts Institute Image Tells A Story

It's summer, but pockets of life brim in Woodside: In a dance studio, girls in brightly colored dresses and vests step to a minuet. In art rooms, students color staid photographs. In the music hall, an orchestra plays. Upstairs, teen playwrights are busy.

More than 150 Newport News students are participating in the annual Summer Institute for the Arts, which offers an intensive six-week program in dance, drama, music, visual arts and creative writing. Students are selected to the program by a panel of area artists and educators after applying, auditioning or interviewing for a spot.

Each is talented, teachers say, and each is passionate about their art -- willing to spend four days a week this summer at Woodside, a performing-arts magnet school, expressing themselves in different ways.

In the dance studio, girls are dressed in purple, green and crimson dresses, accompanied by other girls dressed in knickers, hose, black tricorn hats, red vests, frilled white shirts and navy suit jackets. They lock hands and prance in rigid, formal steps -- the swishing of dresses and clapping of the floor conjuring Victorian dinner parties and opulent New England balls.

The music stops. Order dissolves, and the girls rush around the room, pulling off their outfits in a frenzied rush, readying for the next performance. The girls laugh about mistakes, fret about missing ensembles and whine about misfitting outfits. They button each other's clasps and find each other's shoes. The instructor calls for quiet.

A jazz ballad begins wailing. In sparkling red dresses, top hats, canes and tap shoes, the girls smack the floor, making it ring out like soldiers marching on cobblestones or fireworks bursting on the Fourth of July.

Everyone has their heads down in the art rooms, scribbling, brushing, rubbing. Students bite their lips in concentration, elbows bent in action. Paint comes in gallons: Pepto-Bismol pink, chrome green, turquoise blue. Salvador Dali and Michelangelo prints hang on a wall. Watercolor paintings of orchids, trees and leaves dry by the window. On the gray tabletops where teens work are paintbrushes in plastic cups full of ink-colored water, rulers and watercolor pencils -- all tools of expression.

Some students have taken black-and-white photographs on a Richmond field trip and are coloring them in, such as the bricks in an alley's wall.

"I think it looks like a kid took some chalk and colored in some brick," said Kaitlin Foray, a 16-year-old Menchville student, studying her work. "When I looked at the brick, it looked boring.

"I like trying to take your ideas and putting it down in paper -- things you can't explain in words."

A computer lab with monitors and processors, rigid seats and halogen lights is where creativity is being transferred. The writing journals that students carry are where it exists. In chicken-scratched doodles and hand-scrawled sentence fragments tucked in composition notebooks are stories escaping the teens' minds. The students are transferring and refining them into plays that might be performed in late summer.

Professional writers sometimes come to the class and inspire. Sometimes, inspiration comes through field trips.

Angie Zoumplis, a 13-year-old incoming Warwick student, writes about a shy student, Simon, who's bullied. His friends stick up for him -- only to be hurt in the process.

"I get my ideas from brainstorming and some real-life experiences, too," she said. "You look at the kids in school who are shy and they're bullied, and most don't do anything about it.

"It's not so much myself," she said, "but I'm an observer."

She has yet to write an ending, but she's sure that one will creatively burst when it's time.

"And then I'll take it from there."

Justin George can be reached at 247-4793 or by e-mail at jgeorge@dailypress.com